HN user
Leaving aside how to apply marxian analysis to household relations, non-professional sexual partners, and so forth - the case of how people conceive cam sex workers using these things is an unambiguous example of marxian fetish. Your "human relations disguised as a relation between things" is laid pretty bare, there. That it also puns as "fetish" in a more conventional vulgar sense is just icing on that cake.
"Just want to make sure I understand what you're asking here;"
You really don't.
The main thrust (sorry) of teledildonics as commonly pursued is that subject A presses remote buttons or whatever, and subject B experiences some vibration from the sex toy they are using. A has remotely caused the vibration.
A reverse is also conceivable: subject A is using a teledildonic sex toy, and subject B gets some signal (like a ring-tone or whatever) whenever subject A's erogenous zone muscles contract.
In other words, reversing the direction of the signal. Instead of remotely "doing something" to the sex toy user, one would get some information about what the sex toy user is doing on their own. This is what I asked about. You projected something really strange onto it.
"That's an odd lens to look at the tech industry through... What exactly about the art of crafting, building, manipulating, and operating some of the most complex, sprawling in their capacity to influence people's lives/behaviors, and difficult to understand machines on the planet strikes you as submissive?"
You do it because some jackass told you to do it and gives you some cash to go be rude in bars and restaurants, and to overbid for apartments. Total bdsm degeneracy. Totally undignified. Totally degrading. You're a slave who takes solace in being slightly above the worst off slaves. Nobody in a cooperative society would do what tech workers do and if they tried, they'd be treated as people suffering some kind of cognitive illness.
How is this not an example of commodity fetishism?
Literally unbalanced trade of capital as fetish.
Chapter 1 in a nutshell, so to speak.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm...
I have one more line of questions. I have, um, observed that "cam" sex workers use teledildonics as a kind of "proof of life". The idea is that paying customers send signals to a sex toy in use by the performer, whose reaction reassures the customer that he is paying for a live show. It affords a way of (apparently) "doing stuff" to the performer in spite of the virtualized nature of the show.
Two part question:
1. A sufficiently sophisticated operation could use canned footage to fake the apparent call and response here. Is there any current research in the direction of possible authentication methods to prevent such fakery?
2. What are we to make of the way this form of remote dominance (simulated or real) has been commodified and put in service of capital accumulation? Are not the paying customers even engaging in a form of self-domination, helping to reproduce their roles as wage slaves, by participating in this system of production?
How can tech employers use this technology to optimize workplaces for comfort and productivity?
Also, can teledildonics be applied to improve online shopping experiences and social media? I am thinking that buttplug scripts could be the new emojis or css dazzle.
Lastly, there seems to be some asymmetry in the development of these technologies: Passive reception of dildonic signals is emphasized, active transmission of signals that originate as muscle contractions (and such) gets the short shrift. Is this simply a reflection of the generally submissive tendencies of tech workers or is there a larger force at work here?
I'm just taking you at your word. You advocate not to use GPL but to instead use licenses that permit proprietary derivatives. You describe proprietary derivatives as "a right". You therefore advocate for using the coercive power of the state to deny people the freedom to run, study, modify, and share software. Your version of "freedom" involves taking away vital freedoms from others.
re: "Launching a barrage of 'ad hominem' attacks"
Do you mean like your assertion that RMS created the GPL out of spite?
Profit margins are very high compared to historic trends. Why?
GS notes that costs of production have been going down. Firms move jobs from parts of the world with higher wages, to parts with lower. Firms eliminate jobs through mergers.
GS notes that some commodity demand has been strong as places like China develop.
Lowering costs and keeping demand strong has kept profits high, says GS.
After a time, that should end. Beyond a certain point, mergers are less likely to pay off. Beyond a certain point, there aren't many jobs left to ship to low-wage regions. At the same time, global demand for commodities is weakening.
Those trends should cause immediate drops in revenue, hence profit margins. As these drops take hold, the price of capital assets like factories or tankers of oil or silos of wheat should fall. This should result in job losses, wage reductions, and generally a spiral that further reduces demand, increases deflation, and shrinks profit margins.
Many would argue that deflation and collapse in the corporate profit rate should already be going on, yet it hasn't been. Why? (There are good explanations but this article doesn't talk about them.)
GS quipped, roughly, that if the profit margins don't fall, maybe that means capitalism is broken and doesn't work anymore.
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Not in that article but just FYI: A marxian argument can be made that the real rate of profit is, on average, already negative. If so, that is a sign that capitalism is, as GS suggests, maybe self-destructing at long last. The GS quip is, I think, kind of a wry nod to the marxian view.
Regarding "True freedom is allowing others to extend/improve the code for their own uses."
Can I correctly conclude, then, that you are enthusiastically supportive of people who violate copyright by making and giving away gratis copies? A fan of people who violate EULAs by reverse engineering? Approving of anyone brave enough to defy trade secret laws?
I am always a little surprised at the earnestness with which the counter-libre "open source" propaganda embraces as freedom a handful of very artificially erected rights that rest on state brutality and nothing else.
Further, that in the "open source" view, to resist that state brutality in order to protect users, share, and study power -- these are supposedly acts against freedom.
re: "True freedom is allowing others to extend/improve the code for their own uses. I prefer 'open source' because it fosters the degree of freedom that the GPL only superficially claims to promote."
What is clear is that you promote your freedom to rob others of freedom, with the help of state violence.
The freedom you advocate is a negative freedom: a bondage you want to (or want your employer to) impose on others.
It is still valuable to ask people not to use the term "open source", and to explain why.
The free software movement is a liberation movement. As we have seen in the ~30 years since the movement started, when users are not allowed examine, modify, and share the software runs on their computers that software is used against them. Proprietary software is all about gaining power over users. It is not a theory anymore. It is an overwhelming, proved fact.
The "open source" brand was created to combat the liberation movement. The people who devised the "open source" name and promoted it oppose the free software movement. The "open source" founders set out to advance the cause of gaining power over users.
The free software movement fights for freedom. The "open source" instigators wanted to interfere with that fight, to distract people from it, and above all, to make it harder for the libre software movement to gain technical advantages over proprietary software.
regarding: "Actually, at its core Marxism is about this motto: (take) from each according to his ability, (give) to each according to his needs."
In a communist society there is no state to "take" or "give" in that way.
Nor is Marx's thought or marxism "about [that] motto" "at its core".
If you have arguments to make about a basic income, can you please make them without so badly misrepresenting the thought of others?
I happen to agree that a UBI is silly, bad goal but I'm offended at how falsely Marx is being described here.
mkempe has written a very false description of Marx's work. It is a poor basis for a discussion of basic income programs in relation to Marxian thought.
Furthermore, mkempe has pointed to six historic nations as example of "basic income" gone wrong. None of the six examples he chose offered a basic income guarantee.
I won't dwell on this much but take for example this falsehood:
"This "research" proposal is merely a technocratic rehash of Marxism: the inexorable forces of materialism and technological improvements entail endless progress driven by a Hegelian spirit."
Marx made fun of the idea that history was driven by something like a "Hegelian spirit" (see Critique of the German Ideology).
Although Marx did use the word "materialism" in the phrase "historic materialism", it has no real relation to what mkempe describes here. (See Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)
Marx argued that competition among capitalists, not "spirit" was driving technological improvement in the productivity of labor. (Many places but Capital for example.)
One might say that "Marxism" is not "Marx" and that's fair enough. But Marxist thought, though it often wanders away from Marx, does not involve "Hegelian spirit" or "inexorable forces of materialism". The opposite, actually.
Realizing that the "forces of materialism" DID NOT entail "endless progress", both the Soviet Union and China set out to raise their level of development from agrarian to industrial. Both did so, and quickly.
Thanks! Nifty!
Slightly off topic. The article doesn't call it out but there's a lovely assembly hack here. In:
bec 1f / branch if no error
jsr r5,error / error in file name
<Input not found\n\0>; .even
sys exit
r5 is incremented in a loop, outputing one character at a time. When the null is found, it's time to return.
The instructions used to return from "error:" aren't shown but there is a subtlety here, I think.
".even" after the string constant assures that the next instruction, "sys exit", to which "error:" is supposed to return, is aligned on an even address.
By implication, the return sequence in "error:" just be sure to increment r5, if r5 is odd. I am guessing something like the pseudo-code:
inc r5
and r5, fffe
ret r5
During the Great Depression most people were smart enough to know that reducing hours, without reducing pay, was a good strategy for lowering unemployment.
Of course, capitalists tend to dislike the idea of lowering hours this way. For them, it amounts to a reduction in profit.
If hours are lowered, capitalists will presumably then invest to improve productivity so that the same output can be produced in fewer hours. When they succeed, their rate of profit improves.
Increased productivity without vast new markets opening up means that, in turn, unemployment will again rise.
So there is a virtuous cycle: Cut the work week without cutting wages. Wait for productivity to catch up. Cut the work week again.
If we had an aggressive policy of cutting hours whenever unemployment is too high, and we do this across the board for all sectors, perhaps before long farms will be more fully worked by robots, and so on.
The author of the article wrote: "John Maynard Keynes predicted in the 1930s that by about now, we would all be working a mere 15 hours a week."
Keynes did but it was Marx and Engels who predicted in the 19th century that we'd have to fight for hours reduction every step of the way.
A lot of this essay seems pretty fast and loose with history to me. I hope nobody passively accepts this as an accurate account of social, economic, or governmental history from the Great Depression, through WWII, the mid-20th century, through to today.
Perhaps a ycombinator readership can appreciate a telling example of the problems is in Graham's account of IBM's decision not to exclusively license PC-DOS. Per Graham, this "must have seemed a safe move at the time. No other computer manufacturer had ever been able to outsell them. What difference did it make if other manufacturers could offer DOS too? The result of that miscalculation was an explosion of inexpensive PC clones. Microsoft now owned the PC standard, and the customer. And the microcomputer business ended up being Apple vs Microsoft."
OK, first, every indication is that IBM sought to deliberately create an explosion of inexpensive PC clones -- and that they were better off for it.
Briefly, IBM made a strategic decision that their position would be better if personal computers were a commodity with competitive suppliers rather than an artificial monopoly like Apple products. IBM achieved this aim. Competition meant that PC hardware margins were low, therefore IBM was ultimately better off letting other people make sell them. For years, this was a harsh blow to Apple which thrashed badly after the PC took off.
Second, it is misleading to say that "Microsoft now owned the PC standard, and the customer."
Microsoft has heavyweight influence but does not quite own "the PC standard". More to the point, figurative "ownership" of that standard is not a particularly valuable asset. The "standard" is the definition of a competitive commodity. Competition is hot. Therefore nobody "owns" the standard enough to exclude competing manufacturers in any significant way. Nobody "owns" the standard enough to extract significant rent on it.
Microsoft did gain a monopoly on DOS (then Windows) rents in the deal but (a) There does not seem to be any way IBM itself could have kept those rents while still making the PC a commodity; (b) Microsoft's rents on DOS and its control of what is in DOS have never once hurt IBM. (c) Microsoft's creation of a vast market of developers targeting DOS then Windows platforms has only helped IBM.
In short, Graham's snapshot of that bit of history is just plain counter-factual. I hope careful readers will look pretty skeptically on his accounts of "socialism", economic management during WWII (which was widely understood at the time to be fascist, not socialist), the typical experience of 20th century employment (not nearly as described), his armchair sociology....